Go forth

I’m an information junkie. I thrive on collecting utterly useless information, facts that have no purpose beyond being interesting; indeed, worthy of the splendid Quite Interesting. I’m terrible at remembering dates, but tell me that houseflies take off backwards; that J was the last letter added to the English alphabet; or that the British shrew and the duck-billed platypus share the rare trait among mammals of being venomous; and that nugget of info will stick in some corner of my brain forever, serving no purpose beyond boring the non-trivia-obsessed majority at parties.

This is a serious affliction – it goes to the extent that I will enthusiastically refute, with full evidence, some of the false facts and urban legends that tend to bounce around. Things like the ridiculous claim that we only use 10% of our brain – utter balderdash, except perhaps in the case of footballers and anyone whose car stereo can be heard more than thirty feet away from their car.

As a gift to those doomed infovores with the same kind of all-consuming factual addiction as me, I bring you Wikipedia’s Unusual Articles list. It’s the sort of page that keeps me engrossed for hours, learning about such things as the US town sitting on top of a burning coal seam that is expected to smoulder for 250 years, the Korean belief that using an electric fan in a closed room will kill you, or the shortest war in history (38 minutes). There’s much, much more there to enjoy.

As ever with anything on the internet, where facts can sometimes be created more from a consensual belief rather than hard reality, if you’re ever going to use any of this information in place of smalltalk at parties, make sure you double-check it first lest you come up against a fellow info-addict and descend into the sort of claim and counter-claim spiral that ends with someone being to beaten to death with an encyclopaedia over an assertion that daddy longlegs are the most poisonous animal but that they can’t bite humans*.

* They’re not, even taking into account that what the British and Americans call daddy longlegs are different things: one being an insect, the other a variety of arachnids. See how I’m unable to resist blurting out useless info?

These are quite impressively disturbing.

I recently watched the BBC’s Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press in which the peerless Mr Fry took us through a rebuilding of the daddy of all printing presses, the machine that started it all. Quite aside from the fact that the presence of Stephen Fry instantly elevates any programme to a higher level, the producers admirably resisted the urge to raid the wardrobe department and glue muttonchops to the pimpled cheeks of unemployed actors in the name of ‘period reconstruction’, a curse that affects too many historical documentaries. Instead, we were taken on a gentle but information-packed journey on which the enthusiasm of Fry and the experts building the press was evident.

Gutenberg wasn’t the first to use movable type for printing; as with so much technology it was the Chinese who got there first with letters made from either clay or wood, rather than the lead, tin and antimony alloy pioneered by Johannes. It was his press, though, that made print possible on industrial levels. Before Gutenberg, individual printing plates would be carved from wood, with a separate whole plate needed for every page of a book – an incredibly labour-intensive process. Movable type allowed pages to be assembled much faster and more cheaply, and then simply disassembled into the constituent letters once a print-run was complete, ready for the next job.

On a totally self-regarding level, I wouldn’t be a graphic designer today without the developments and innovations branching from the Gutenberg Press. Yet despite the massive impact that the Gutenberg Press had, one of its main principles has become almost obsolete. These days, using automation rather than by hand, we have the ability to once again produce whole plates for each page of a print job, albeit a separate plate for each colour used. Movable type is rarely seen except in specialist letterpress printers, and is likely to disappear altogether in the next decade or so. It may well be that even the inky goodness of printing itself will decline over the next fifty to a hundred years, overtaken by computer and electronic technologies and harried by the environmental concerns raised over the chemicals and paper required.

The principles behind movable type might have more longevity. To take music as an example, I can see remixing and sampling as being somewhat analogous – taking the building blocks of one or many songs and recombining them into something new. It is the concept of having reusable, generic units in a limited selection of forms that can be unified and integrated into almost limitless variety. As nanotechnology advances, I’m sure we will see similar techniques come into use. Already, molecular manipulation of carbon into basic forms such as nanotubes and buckyballs shows how this building block approach is useful.

Nevertheless, the sheer world-changing importance of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention cannot be overstated. It’s the revolutionary alteration to the flow of knowledge within society that is the Gutenberg legacy. Writing allowed humankind to record information; printing allowed that information to be spread. Books are a vector for change – they bridge gaps between diverse societies and spur development on a whole different scale.

The documentary is available for a short while on the BBC’s own iPlayer here (do a search for Gutenberg), and also separated into parts on YouTube starting here, where I’m sure it will shortly be quietly disappeared by the powers that be.

Now I’ve had a bit of a rant about doggy accoutrements before but take a look at this:

Aaah, it’s a cave for your pet pooch from Pooch Online. Your beloved bundle of fluff can pretend it’s a bit more of a wolf than its four-inch legs might suggest. This custom cavern is built with a multi-layer construction for “a cozy, calm denning experience”. I’m sure you’ve heard many complaints from dogs who are unhappy with the poor denning experience provided by their owners – a simple basket and blanket just doesn’t measure up when Fido next door can go spelunking through his very own Wookey Hole.

Not to mention the “grand, cathedral-like entry of the root” to impress upon visitors that this is the very highest echelon of fake papier mâché dog caves (although the site says ‘paper mache’ because speaking French is un-American.)

But the defining pinnacle of this astounding canine chamber is the accessory it comes with: a personal, limited edition “Sidekick Rock”. Rover’s life is now complete. Your pet will now have it’s own 70s-fad-inspired pet rock, albeit one that’ll be kinder to the teeth than the original version.

Obviously, by the time I had read through to this point I had already pulled my wallet out ready to buy, despite not even owning a dog. This is the ultimate item to make my life complete. Add to basket, add to basket.

Then, just as I was typing in my credit card details, I noticed something odd. There was a little number that needed my attention – the price.

$5900

Even with the exchange rates at present, that’s around £2,900. It would appear that the current housing crisis hasn’t had a knock-on effect on doggy domiciles. For a lump of paste and cardboard reminiscent of something you’d make in primary school when you’re not eating the glue and flicking paint at the girls across the desk, you’re practically going to have to take out a mortgage.

I hope your dog can afford to pay rent.

What exactly does Andie MacDowell do now, apart from appear in adverts for wrinkle cream? She certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much acting, the very thing that presumably got her the job as L’Oréal’s facial fold reduction spokesperson.

Perhaps the constant application of cosmetics has decreased her many wrinkles and creases so much that she’s now become two dimensional, a flat sheet that can only be seen from two sides, like a cardboard cutout. The next step will be for L’Oréal to introduce a kind of facial mangle that you can run your head through to achieve absolute flatness, a Euclidean plane in which your wrinkles are not only reduced – they’re a mathematical impossibility. The CrushaLux Ultra: Because you’re worth it.

Th only problem though, if I’ve got my geometry right, is that if you reduce a three dimensional object with mass to a mathematical plane, that plane becomes infinitely large, although only in two dimensions. The thought of an infinite Andie MacDowell flogging cosmetics is just too much to bear, and she wouldn’t fit on my TV screen.

Before you read the rest of this post, a notice:

Warning: The copyright proprietor has licensed this blog post (including its non-existent soundtrack) for private home use only. The definition of home use excludes the use of this blog post at locations such as clubs, coaches, hospitals, hotels, oil rigs, prisons, schools, the birthday parties of small children, monasteries, igloos, bawdy houses, deep-sea submersibles, space shuttles and monkey (or related ape) enclosures.

Any unauthorised copying, editing, exhibition, renting, exchanging, hiring, lending, broadcasting, reading, laughing at, quoting, extolling, denying, decrying, considering, ignoring, or thinking of this blog post, or any part thereof, is strictly prohibited and any such action establishes liability for a civil action and may give rise to criminal prosecution, professional assassination, strategic nuclear missile launch and the selling into slavery of the first-born of all your descendants in perpetuity.

Despite the fact that you are reading this completely legally and legitimately, I will now compel you to watch an unskippable film about how copying this blog post supports criminals, murderers, rapists and terrorists, and contributes to global warming, extinction of endangered animals, armageddon and heat rash.

I think you can see my point. I rather object to having threats rammed into my face every time I want to watch a DVD that I have bought with my own money from a completely licit retailer. And today as I browsed the film racks at my local Tesco store in the hope of finding something good to watch in the evening (at the same time worrying about the state of society when finding that The Condemned was in the charts, boasting the all-star line-up of former wrestler ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and former wrestler-pretending-to-be-footballer Vinnie Jones), I noticed something disturbing. From the flat screens that Tesco seem to have installed everywhere to further the cause of a Blade Runner/Minority Report-inspired advertising-saturated future came the sounds of the deeply irking ‘knock-off Nigel’ anti-piracy advert that’s been doing the rounds on TV.

Great. Thank you Tesco and whichever anti-copying federations are active in the UK. Thanks for browbeating and berating me about piracy even as I stand there hoping to give you money. Perhaps you could put a screen up by the eggs warning me that if I were to buy them and throw them at someone, I’ll be arrested and imprisoned for assault? Or how about a sign by the bananas covering the legal perils of dropping one of their skins and explaining how I’d be sued to kingdom come? Do these people not think that suggesting their own customers are criminals just might not be the best way to go about things?

I shall leave you with this lovely interpretation of the anti-copying trailer from the IT Crowd.

I have new eyes.

Or to be more precise, I have new glasses in order to cater for my evidently inferior genetics – thanks for that, ancestors. Practically the entire rest of my family are long-sighted but I like to be different so I’m short sighted and astigmatic. Perhaps I’m some kind of mutant; that’d explain the instant healing and extendable claws too.

Going to the opticians is fraught with the kind of insignificant minor perils that fill the lives of we upstart hominids ever since we decided to use our opposable thumbs for more than just doing impressions of the Fonz.

Firstly there’s the eye test itself. It’s mostly pretty benign, except for that godawful glaucoma test where jets of air are fired at your eyeballs in order to test the fluid pressure (tonometry, if you’re looking for a new word). Of course, what the optician is really measuring is quite how high you jump out of the chair each time they fire the machine, in the hope of beating Gavin’s score from last week when a customer knocked themselves out on the ceiling. Next time you have to endure that test, look upwards first to see how many dents and little clumps of skull matter are embedded in the tiles above you.

Next, once it’s been pointed out that you have approximately the same visual acuity as an earthworm, off you trot to choose your frames. At this point you’ll be confronted with about a billion different concoctions of wire, plastic and lens from which you must choose just one. Rumour has it that when Sisyphus was given the choice between rolling a boulder up a mountain for eternity or picking out the perfect pair of specs, he plumped for the easier option and headed for the hills.

I’ve often wondered how people with seriously poor vision are able to choose their glasses frames because as soon as they take their current pair off to try on the new set in the shop – hey presto – everything’s gone blurry and they can’t see well enough to decide whether they look good. Bit of a catch-22, that one.

Finally, when you’ve picked the glasses that make you look least like Elton John, you come to that special point when you realise that your fabulous new pair of spectacles are actually going to be somewhat redundant. Because, in order to afford the price of the frames, the lenses, and being squirted in the eye with high-pressure air, you’re going to have to sell your corneas on the human organs black market.

Anyways, I got through all that a week ago without having to auction off too many essential body parts and took delivery of my new specs on Friday. They look like this if you’re interested. From past experience frames by Oakley tend to be extremely comfortable and fit like a glove (if your head were a hand, that is). Plus, they don’t go flying across the court when I make any particularly sudden movements in badminton.

They’re not that dissimilar to my previous pair, and what has always amused me is how ridiculously impractical the case that comes with them is: a huge rounded metal torpedo that, if you can even fit it in your trouser pocket, makes you look like the world’s most well-endowed gentleman. Venture into any airport with it and you’ll be shot on suspicion of carrying a pipe bomb, unless it’s Heathrow where they have no doubt lost the guns in the same place everyone’s luggage has gone.

I got a pair of prescription sunglasses too (here, stalkers), and the case for these is a hilariously even larger black woven-nylon lozenge – about the size of two Volvo’s and a Nissan Micra. This is not practical design, Oakley. When I pack for holiday, the glasses case is supposed to go inside the suitcase, and not vice-versa. This massive coffin will not fit in any pocket known to mankind and is more likely to sit for eternity like a 2001-style monolith.

1) Loituma - Ievan Polkka

I first heard this tune playing over a dreamily bizarre video of a full-grown moose living as a house-pet in a family’s home – literally a moose loose aboot the hoose. It had its own mattress to lie on as it watched television, and at one point appears to carefully straighten a picture hanging on the wall. What made the footage a little sinister was that there were clearly moose antlers on the wall of one of the rooms. It brought to mind thoughts of ancient pagan rituals, where the unknowing victim is treated to a life of luxury before being sacrificed to the gods of fertility or clotheshangers or whatever.

But quite aside from that, it was the music that caught my attention. It reminds me a little of Sigur Ros, darlings of BBC nature film trailers and one of the few things to come out of Iceland apart from Bjork and garishly coloured packets of cheap frozen prawns. If you were just to take the vocals from a clutch of Sigur Ros tunes, layer them on top of each other and speed the whole lot up tenfold you might come out the other end with something like this song.

The band is from Finland and they’re called Loituma. To non-Finnish ears it sounds like a barbershop quartet who’ve experienced a life-altering religious experience that caused them to start speaking in tongues, but to a native this is a touching 1930s folk song. Be warned, this is also a major earworm that may well sneak into your head and never escape.

2) Bert and Ernie play a nice little song.

Who was it who said that comedy occurs when the familiar is juxtaposed with the unexpected? Oh yeah, it was me, just now. Watch.

An Easter weekend trip to Kent to meet up with old university friends included the always slightly disconcerting experience of being one of three Andrews in close proximity, and also culminated in a trip to Howletts to stare at exotic animals who have no doubt become quite befuddled by their sudden relocation to the ‘garden of England’.

It gave me the first real chance to try out my new fancy-shmancy camera (a Nikon D40X for the geeks among you). It was, to be fair, not the best of days for photography. Not only was the light terrible – he says, pretending he knows what he’s talking about – but biting gale-force winds turned my fingers into immovable stubs and threatened at one point to fling me into the elephant enclosure. Many of the animals quite sensibly chose to stay indoors, probably pining for their native savannahs of Africa. I imagine the prospect of living a constant struggle for life seemed at that point somewhat preferable to having your fur forcibly rearranged by the weather.

Despite all that though, I did end up taking a great many photos. I’ve been pretty self-critical in picking out the very few that I consider to be any good; there’s a lot I still need to learn about choosing the right aperture and focus to make the most of a photo. You can jump to my Flickr gallery by clicking either here or on the image at the top of this post.

German police are trying to trace the owner of a sheep which outran police patrol cars and beat up a police dog.

Just got to think up a snappy name now. The Iron Lamb? Woolverine? The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtleneck Jumper?

…when a headline like this can exist:

Cassini Spacecraft to Dive Into Water Plume of Saturn Moon

Lately I’ve been playing a little game called AudioSurf. It’s best described as a melding of music, Tetris, Formula 1 racing and strong psychotropic drugs. In essence, it takes any music you choose from your computer and converts the beats and tempo into a winding racetrack along which you travel in a little multi-coloured rocketship, collecting coloured blocks to make groups and score points.

Sounds absolutely inane, doesn’t it?

Yet for reasons I find it difficult to explain, it’s utterly compelling. The racetrack is synced so closely with the music playing that it links you intensely to the tune – strong rhythms produce regular bumps and hills, loud guitars speed you up while mellow passages slow you down again. Colours wax and wane with tempo in a way that I suspect emulates listening to Pink Floyd on lysergic acid. If this game had been around in the sixties, flower-power might well have persisted much longer. If you’re able to ‘feel’ the music (man!) you play better and gain higher scores.

And those points become important to you as, for every song played through, the score is automatically uploaded to the global rankings. The satisfaction of completing a tricky song and finding yourself at the top of the scoreboard for the entire world is immense. Want to have the world’s best score for Hysteria by Def Leppard (cheesy rock works wonderfully for this game)? Well you’ll have to beat me first. And if you do, I’ll get an email informing me that I’ve been dethroned so I can try and claim top ranking again – I’ve defended my placing once already.

If you’re someone who likes their music, it’s a new way to experience songs, and an excellent excuse to delve into those gigabytes of dubious-origin mp3’s sitting on your hard drive in search of those that give the best rides. Furthermore, AudioSurf only costs about a fiver when bought online through Steam so it’s cheaper and longer lasting than the drugs you’d usually need to obtain the same effects.

Quick endnote here: Unusually, I imagine, practically all the music on my computer – and iTunes reports nearly 13 solid days worth of it – is entirely legal, from CDs that I’ve bought myself. I think the number of tracks that I don’t own the original recording for is probably in single figures and I’d have trouble remembering which they are. I’m a bit old fashioned in that I like to have a physical CD, with the tactile artwork booklet that goes with it. That’s probably the designer in me pulling the strings there. I’ve also got great respect for the concept of a cohesive album of music – an emotional ride through the songs in the order the artist originally intended. The move to digital has lost that a little, with people able to pick and choose just those songs that they immediately like without having the chance for other songs to grow on them. I’ve often bought an album and found that tracks I didn’t originally like all that much gradually creep up on me until I realise that they are actually far better than initial impressions suggested.

When I’m bored there are times when the mind wanders in strange directions. And one of those directions has thrown up the following list of imaginary animals.

Please, dear readers, feel free to join in if you have any of your own.

Elepant: A large animal with a shiny skin ideal for making capacious trousers for popular beat artists such as MC Hammer.

Masking Shark: A vicious fish that won’t hesitate to bite, but luckily can be pulled off rather easily. Is somewhat resistant to paint.

Boeing Constrictor: Perhaps the most dangerous snake in the world – death from above at 500mph. Not to be confused with the harmless Feather Boa.

Marrowhawk: The universe’s only known airborne carnivorous vegetable.

Glue tit: Collects berries and seeds on its body by flying at speed through bushes. Mates for life, mainly because it has no choice in the matter.

Gimpanzee: A very submissive, rubbery ape. Waterproof and, should it fall out of a tree, simply bounces.

Komodo Wagon: A rather tragic reptile that – if it can’t find a slope – can only get around by lying in wait for other animals, biting one when it gets close, and hoping that it’ll be dragged somewhere new.

Tasmanian Breville: Australian marsupial which toasts its own food in a specially adapted pouch.

Chocolate Moose: Almost extinct due to hunting. Not found in warm climates.

Ford Puma: Small feline that looks as though it should have a good turn of speed, but in reality is disappointingly sluggish.

Solar Bear: Arctic bear that needs no food whatsoever. Popular with conservationists for its very low environmental impact. Has an unfortunate tendency to drown when it tries to go swimming at night.

Sporkbill: Close relative of the Spoonbill, only more adaptable.

Ray Mearskat: Gregarious rodent that can find food anywhere, and can make a shelter, four-course meal and a canoe out of a single twig and a pawful of nettles.

Armadildo: That’s quite enough of that.

So then, Network Rail has been fined a record £14 million for screwing up rail maintenance over Christmas.

Now let’s get this straight. Network Rail is having its usual host of difficulties taking care of the tracks that are generally considered fairly important for trains, and trains are of course pretty important for getting trainspotters off the streets where they’d probably indulge their odd compulsions by collecting guns before one day cracking and heading off to work with a bagful of heavy weaponry.

Obviously then, the answer is to take away the money that Network Rail would use to carry out that maintenance because, as we all know, having less money to invest is guaranteed to mean a better service all round. If we took away all their money, just think how absolutely amazing the train networks would become. I expect we’d get a hundred trains an hour, shooting along tracks as smooth as buttered mercury.

And taking away money is much easier than looking into the problem, working out efficient solutions and employing people to do the job properly. I’ll even help them with suggestions on how to get along with even less money. For example, why don’t we convert the whole system to monorail? That’d mean they’d only have half the amount of track to maintain, instantly halving costs and freeing up cash to pay some more fines. Soon the system will be so efficient that all the funding given to Network Rail will be instantly bounced back again to the government, save for a modest fee of around 20 percent to pay for the bureaucrats needed to think up and administer those fines.

Hmm, hold on a minute. Bounced back to the government? What do you mean, ‘back’? Well, here’s the thing. It’s not a big thing, so let’s not dwell on it too much. Barely even important, really. It’s just that Network Rail is funded by…er…the government, although they are quite keen to give the impression that this isn’t the case. And the government is funded by…um…everyone who pays taxes. So this £14 million of fines is just taxpayers’ money that the government gave to Network Rail, and is now taking back again, less all the thousands of pounds needed to pay for the civil servants and paperwork.

It’s a bit like a lovely merry-go-round of taxes, except that this particular merry-go-round happens to be run by some rather creative minions of Satan who are making it slowly spiral inwards, compressing all the cash into a massive black hole comprised of nothingness and terrible rail transport systems.

Genius like this makes my head hurt.

A thought, of the kind that crosses my mind when I’m trying to find excuses not to go to sleep:

If we had perfect memories, would nostalgia still exist?

Is the hankering for the “good old days” just the automatic self-editing of our minds to filter out the banal, humdrum, and even unhappy side of the past – leaving or enhancing the stronger, pleasant feelings? The good things seem to become better, the bad things become just a little less bad. Does the brain have a little optician’s shop just behind the amygdala to supply its own custom pair of rose tinted spectacles?

If we didn’t forget or alter these events in our mind, retaining a perfect record of our experiences, would we be denied the ability to look back so fondly on things? “Schooldays are the happiest days of your lives” is a phrase that is so often trotted out it has become a cliché, but with our brain’s tendency to modify the truth, who can really tell?

As technology advances, we’re likely to gain ways to record our experiences more accurately. It’ll start in the military and particularly police forces where head-mounted cameras and logging systems are already being trialled, making it possible to accurately keep track of evidence. Over time, this will move into consumer use, and most likely eventually to be integrated into our bodies and accessible on a whim.

It will be the ultimate diary, faithfully tracking every experience. But it won’t automatically do what the brain does – it won’t enhance some memories and suppress others. It will be full and complete; the good, the bad, and a whole lot of the absolutely dull routine rigamarole of life. Ninety percent of it will be memories of brushing teeth, getting dressed, eating, or watching television.

Nostalgia isn’t reality, so will it be lost? And with perfect recall of the best, most enjoyable things we have done, will we be forlorn to look through our memories and see how little of the time we have actually spent doing those excellent things against the time we’ve spent hanging around, working, sleeping, eating?

I have just watched probably one of the stupidest films ever.

Except… let me just stop there, for a quick interjection of honesty. In actuality I haven’t just watched this film. Instead I saw it a couple of nights ago. See how I’m deceiving you and trying to increase the emphasis on stupidity by suggesting that I immediately needed to rush off and blog about it? You’re just absolutely reliant on the honesty of my reporting, aren’t you? I could tell you almost anything and you’d have no idea how true it was. Admittedly, I’d struggle to get away with spinning a tale of a night of passion with Scarlett Johansson (it was actually Angelina Jolie), but for all you know I might be sitting here with my underpants on my head making up every last word as imaginary butterflies spray rainbows through the air.

But despite the temptations, I will try always to be honest, good and truthful, so let’s start again.

Two nights ago, I watched probably one of the stupidest films ever. My grammatically correct heart here wants to write ‘most stupid’, but ’stupidest’ just rings better – you can imagine Elmer Fudd expelling a shower of saliva as he says it.

The title of this film is Shoot ‘Em Up, not an auspicious start if you’re looking for something like a searing portrait of working class life set against the background of the miners’ strikes. But I wasn’t looking for that, because it would be tremendously dull.

It is effectively 83 minutes of the most ridiculously unlikely rolling gun battles and violence with nary a pause for breath. In a bold move, the director has chosen to use the money that would usually be wasted on things like screenwriters and plots to buy in a lorryload of blank bullets and an army of extras whose sole purpose is to die incredibly swiftly. How stupid is it? Well, the lead character, played by Clive Owen, kills someone with a carrot. Repeatedly.

Obviously, Shoot ‘Em Up is brilliant. It is the epitome of mindless entertainment, and there are times when that’s all you need. Switch on television, switch off brain, enjoy, pausing only to wipe the little stream of dribble from the corner of your slackly hanging mouth.

I have a certain fondness for that kind of film – it’s the same joyous cavalcade of stunts that you get in practically every Jackie Chan film. Or in Crank for that matter, which is basically Speed but with Jason Statham playing the bus – if his heart-rate goes below a certain level, he dies. (Funnily enough, if my heart-rate goes below a certain level, I die too, but the point is that he’s got to keep his rate very high. It fails to make any more sense in the movie either, so don’t worry.)

So, you should watch Shoot ‘Em Up if you can. You’ll never admit to anyone that you enjoyed it, and those brain cells won’t grow back, but you can have fun telling everyone quite how stupid it is.

This is the new logo for Cardiff. It cost £45,000.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No.

This does not say Cardiff. It does not evoke images of the city’s history, its castle or attractions. It has no sense of the national pride of the Welsh, or indeed any humanity whatsoever. It just does nothing, slipping out of the mind faster than a greased ferret down a teflon pipe. This is the logo of a low-grade technology park, a cheap paint manufacturer or a doomed-to-failure eBay clone.

I’m not even the slightest bit Welsh, but I feel embarrassment for anyone in Cardiff who is going to have to accept this as a representation of their city.

Phew. Bit of a gap in blog posting here – the past five days have been magazine deadline. Every month, the week before print date is a final rush of 12 hour days to get editorials designed, adverts in, and pages in place. Thus does the glamorous world of publishing concertina down into the reality of sitting in front of a computer until your eyeballs collapse, roll down your cheeks and land damply on the desk so they can stare up accusingly at you for inflicting such abuses upon them.

We usually try to organise deadlines so they fall on a Friday; it allows a weekend to recover. Printers work practically 24-7 to keep the presses active so the mag will typically be turned from electronic files to coloured sheets of dead wood on the Sunday. Then it’s off to the shops, and the airport lounges, and around the world in the expensive-class cabins of various airlines.

So what’s been happening out of work in the meantime? Well, for a start the spambots have found the blog, rather faster than I expected. I’m getting about five spam comments a day at present, offering me enough genital enlargement tonics that I’d need a wheelbarrow to get around. WordPress is doing a pretty good job of filtering them out though.

More importantly, the MacBook Air has arrived to satisfy my geeky cravings, and it’s pretty darn perfect for my needs. This very entry is being typed from the downy embrace of my bed as iTunes wirelessly streams post-deadline stress-deadening music across the network – a bit of Alabama 3 hits the spot just nicely.

It amused me to see how, shortly after Apple announced the launch of this svelte little slice of technology, the internet became filled with the usual barely coherent keyboard-pounding monkeys announcing how “it sucks, lol” or variations on the theme.

Have you noticed how so many of our fellow travellers in the interworldweb seem to default into only two possible reactions in situations like this? Either they profess to hate something so much it makes them physically retch up their stomach lining like a sea cucumber, or they love it with a passion that compels them to defend its honour in the manner of a sex-smitten illiterate baboon. You see it in YouTube comments, discussion forums, blogs, everywhere.

For these people there is no middle ground, no compromise. Each knows he or she is right, and will fight to the bitter death with broken English and unintelligible invective. Were I still officially studying English Language, I might be tempted to write a paper on the subject – it’s practically the opposite of Grice’s cooperative principles.

Or perhaps these aren’t real people at all. Perhaps this is just what the spambots do for fun when they’re not plaguing other people’s blogs – expressions of their essential binary, computery nature where you’re either a 1 or a 0, for it or against.

Let us fight for the middle ground, I say. Let us weigh the pros and cons of every situation. Let us champion the cause of reasoned argument, flexible viewpoints and different strokes for different folks.

And if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong and you suck.

I have a confession to make. So here it is: I don’t drink coffee.

Not one of those earth-shattering confessions, I know. It’s not a revelation that I’m actually two people, or that I’ve been dead all along. But, from the reactions I get from people, it seems to be considered a little unusual. It’s like saying you’re not a fan of breathing, or that no, you wouldn’t like to win the lottery thank you very much.

The typical reply I get when people find out about my coffee-averse nature is for them to suggest that I’m being sensibly healthy, as if it’s a puritan choice I’ve made to extricate myself from the grasping clutches of caffeine in order to become a god amongst men. That’s not the case though – I scoff enough chocolate to easily make up for the lack of caffeine in my fluid intake, added to which there’s a regular can of Cherry Coke that makes up my afternoon ritual on workdays. Coca Cola ranks slightly below depleted uranium on the ‘good for you’ scale.

The reason I don’t drink coffee is this: I don’t like it.

I know it’s supposed to be an acquired taste; kids hate it, but for teenagers it becomes a grown-up thing to do, then by the time adulthood comes coffee is just a natural part of social life. The rise of all the Costa Bucks and Star Neros cafe-genericae shows the power of coffee culture. All these places have a range of options for coffee-dodgers like me though – hazelnut hot chocolates seem to be in season at present. Mmm, nutty.

Yet not drinking coffee still causes awkwardness – I remember a friend crying in bewilderment “But you don’t even drink coffee!” when finding out I was reading a book about the bean’s history. Equally, there are bonuses: I don’t have to get involved with making drinks at work, especially since I don’t drink tea either. Which, incidentally, to me tastes like hot, wet cardboard – I genuinely struggle to imagine how anybody could drink that stuff at all.

Nevertheless, there are signs that I might be changing, slowly adapting as I’m worn down by the constant presence of coffee around me. Last summer, I discovered frappuccinos, which although not exactly your traditional mode of coffee, are a lot closer to it than I usually get. So in ten years time I may find myself a happy part of normal coffee-driven culture. Of course, knowing my luck, by that time the rest of society may well be fixated on beverages made out of pine bark and squirrel droppings or something and I’ll be causing just as much bafflement as I am now.

This is just one of those astounding images I could look at for hours.

I was idly skimming through a copy of Marketing at work a while back when the UK launch of the following essential product caught my eye:

Yes, these are exactly what they appear to be. Snausages Breakfast Bites are bacon and egg shaped food items for dogs, presumably for doting owners to feed to their little Fido at the break of day. Needless to say, they originate in America.

I’m sorry, but dogs do not care what their food looks like, as evidenced by their continued survival on miscellaneous brown and grey meat paste from a Pedigree Chum tin. Dogs will eat anything, up to and including sticks, stones and their own poo. Actually looking at what they’re about to scarf down comes as an afterthought.

And if your much-loved bundle of fuzz were to take a glance at these bacon and egg shaped travesties in the moments before slobbering, they’d be pretty disappointed. Because looking at the ingredients, ‘Breakfast Bites’ contain neither bacon nor eggs, making them a kind of zen food: What is the taste of no eggs and bacon?

Holy cow though, they do have oregano, black pepper, basil, rosemary and marjoram – that’s more herbs than I usually use when I cook something. The ‘chicken by-product meal’ sounds mighty tasty too.

A nose around on the Snausages site (and when typing ‘Snausages’ I have to resist the urge to follow it with a ™) uncovers a treasure trove of twee and pointless foods like these 101 Dalmations biscuits with facts about the film printed upon them:

Hint to manufacturers: Dogs cannot read. Humans can read but do not generally read dog biscuits. And even if dogs could read, they aren’t likely to want to know that each dog in a film they will never see has 32 spots. They would much rather have information as to what each character’s bottom smells like – that’s far more relevant to your average canine.

Honestly, novelty shaped food is something that should be restricted to small children for whom rocket shaped breakfast cereal, Billy Bear sausagemeat and alphabetti spaghetti will induce gurglings of delight. I notice that Snausages don’t seem to produce any cat-shaped dog biscuits - maybe that’s introducing owners to too much of what I like to call reality.

Talking about spaghetti though…

Come on now, dogs are descended from cunning wild animals streaking across open plains in groups, running down herds of deer and antelope for food. Wolf packs did not sit and decide to go for a quick spag bol or lasagne instead. A wolf deciding to go for a quick Italian just means it’s chasing a chap who’s particularly light on his feet. Pasta is not dogfood – the only reason Rover will eat this is because it’s wrapped around lumps of lamb and dogs can’t hide the bits they don’t want under their spoon like a child can.

This Friday was one of the semi-regular trips to London I make to meet with former university compadre Cap’n Sharp. We usually try to do a couple of museums or exhibitions, rounded off by what has now become a tradition of cocktails at a TGI Fridays. I’m not quite sure how manly it is to drink a huge banana and ice cream concoction called a Chocolate Monkey, but it tasted just fine, as did all the other cocktails I tested. Still got to pluck up the courage to ask for a Grendel though…

But that’s beside the point. It’s the culture that’s the important bit, and first stop was the Wellcome Collection, which can only be described as a smorgasbord of medical ephemera thrown into a series of rooms with only loose connections between the various items. Thus there’s an entire mummified body cheek by jowl with a Chinese sign made from human teeth, some 19th century Japanese sex aids, slivers of tattooed skin and a trepanned skull. There is a bit of an emphasis on bodily remains, so the squeamish might want to give it a miss.

There is also a small area dedicated to more recent medical research, in particular the Human Genome Project. A huge rack of books printed in tiny lettering comprise the raw DNA sequence of one person and serve to give a good insight into the sheer amount of data encoded in the molecule. But, and this was the case with most of the Wellcome Collection, I would have liked a bit more information about this. If you’re up on your biology, you’ll know that DNA is encoded with bases designated by A, C, G and T. Through the books on display, some of the letter groupings were in lowercase, while others were capitals, but with nothing to explain the difference. I would guess that perhaps these designate encodings for specific amino acids, as opposed to the junk DNA that makes up much of the molecule, but who knows? I do find sometimes in museums that not enough information is given to the visitor – I appreciate that you don’t always have time to read huge swathes of text about an exhibit, but it would be nice to have the option.

Perhaps the most cohesive part of the Collection was the current temporary exhibition Sleeping & Dreaming which benefited from being dedicated to one topic.

The afternoon destination was the Design Museum, which is always a bit of a gamble depending on what they are exhibiting at any given time. This month’s focus was Jean Prouvé, whose skills lay more in the functional than aesthetic - some of the classic school chair designs, for example, where economy and durability outweighs beauty. As Cap’n Sharp pointed out, they are some of the items that you don’t think of having been designed in the first place. Prouvé also produced some interesting modular architecture, but this wasn’t shown to very good effect at the exhibition. All in all a bit of a disappointment, for me at least. This was balanced out however by the ever-intriguing shop at the Design Museum, filled with all kinds of designery knick knacks. It could easily be extended to twice its size or more and still be successful.

So then, plans are afoot to reintroduce beavers to Scotland around 400 years after they died out, with the primary reasoning being to promote so-called ‘beaver-tourism’ – a popular activity in Amsterdam, I hear. Wolves and wildcats are also candidates to bypass the immigrant detention centres and be let loose on the highlands.

The concept is quite beguiling – I’ve always felt that Britain was disappointingly lacking in serious wildlife. The USA has alligators, wolves, bears, mountain lions and more. We just get badgers – only dangerous if you’re a fan of mashed potato and called Bodger – and foxes, which are basically ginger dogs that have found a way to get food without the need for tin-opener-operating humans. We could do with a giant feral hedgehog or something to instill some respect for nature and pick off the occasional drunken chav late at night. Particularly the one having an argument at the top of his voice on his mobile outside my window at three in the morning last week – a vicious six-foot ball of spines and teeth rolling out of the darkness would have sorted that one a treat.

It’d add a bit more of a challenge to hunters too. There’d be the chance that as you stare through your high-power scope at a distant stag munching on the moor and generally minding his own business, there could be a pack of wolves behind you about to turn you into pedigree chum. That’d even up the odds a little.

But seriously, I do worry that we humans as a species never seem to learn. I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a human-driven introduction of a species that has actually gone well. They seem to have been almost universally disastrous in environmental and frequently economic terms – rabbits in Australia, killer bees, zebra mussels, cane toads (in Australia again, a country which has been comprehensively decimated by many, many species introduced by humans). Even seaweed has gone horribly wrong.

The usual pattern is that once an unfamiliar species is introduced, it enters an environment where nothing is equipped to keep its numbers down. Subsequently, it’ll breed like…er…rabbits, take over, and destroy populations of whatever it feeds on plus out-perform any competitors and, if you’re super unlucky as is the case with cane toads, the introduced species will be poisonous and kill half the animals that do try to eat it. Habitats are networks of evolved relationships, and sticking a new creature in there leapfrogs (no pun intended) evolution to frequently detrimental effects.

So yeah, the idea of beavers is nice in principle, but let’s hope that those responsible are pretty damn sure that they know what they’re doing. I’m not that hopeful myself.

Irony in action, folks.

One day last year at work my friend Emily and I heard a rather insistent mewing sound coming from the front door. And by insistent, I mean that we work upstairs and could still hear it. When we went to investigate, we found this:

As soon as we opened the door the cat trotted in, happy as you like, meowing all the time and rubbing up against us to say hello. After a while, and since we had to get back to work, we coaxed it back outside and regretfully headed back upstairs.

Except things didn’t end there. A couple of days later, the cat appeared again. And again the day after that. It started to jump through the downstairs windows whenever they were left open in order to explore the office and had to be chased out when it stomped over the keyboards in accounting. At lunch time, if you went outside it’d run up to you in greeting, or sleep in your lap…

Over time, it learnt when to turn up. I’d arrive each day at ten to nine in the morning to find it waiting at the door, nose pressed against the glass. It started to demonstrate better timekeeping than some of the employees. When we let it in, it’d immediately prance upstairs to the production office, which it would carefully explore to see what had changed from the last time it had visited. All this time the cat would be purring and kneading the floor with its front paws so much that it looked like it was on a rocking boat in a stormy sea. After exploration time to check that everything was to its liking, the cat would usually curl up asleep in the empty chair behind me for the rest of the day:

Inevitably, the cat got a name - dubbed Pushkin by our editor. It was evident Pushkin had a home; usually at around half four she would wake up, stretch, and paw at the door to be let out. On a couple of occasions she’d come in having had flea drops put behind her neck, so someone must have been taking care of her – there are houses behind the office which we suspect she came from. We were careful never to feed her, except for the time she pulled a packet of old, stale pitta bread from a bin and delicately munched away the soft upper side of one.

Pushkin was smart too – I was usually the one to let her out when I noticed her scratching at the door from the production office to the stairs. So she figured that she could pretend to stand there so that as soon as I stood up and walked over to open the door, she ran behind me, jumped up on my chair and curled up in a nice warm spot rather than her usual colder throne. I had officially been outwitted by a cat.

She brought tremendous enjoyment to everyone in the office – staff from downstairs would come up especially to see her and to watch her twitching in her chair as she dreamt the day away. Any deadline stress could instantly be cured by a few moments stroking Pushkin. She once spent half an hour sitting on my desk, her nose resting on my wrist, intently watching the mouse cursor dart around the screen as I laid out pages for the magazine. We (okay, I) even built her a castle from a Mac shipping box. You can’t see here the windows and nameplate that were added later:

Unfortunately, as I write this we’ll be heading into the fourth week without any sign of Pushkin. The office feels emptier without her. I hope that the reason she’s disappeared is benign – maybe her owners have moved away, or she’s found another place in which to while away the hours. Perhaps there’s another office in Chelmsford that is having their day brightened by a friendly furry visitor. But there’s a lot of traffic in the area, so I can’t help but fear the worst.

You never know, though; maybe one day when I turn into the courtyard at my workplace in the morning, she’ll be sitting there waiting. We’re certainly going to keep the job free for her.